Francisco Franco

Francisco Franco was a Spanish general who led the military rebellion against the Second Republic in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 and then ruled Spain as dictator until his death in 1975. Helped to victory by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, he imposed a regime that killed, imprisoned and exiled hundreds of thousands of its opponents, and he remained in power for almost four decades, long after his wartime allies had fallen.

Franco was born on 4 December 1892 in Ferrol, a naval town in Galicia, into a family of naval officers. His father was a free-living paymaster; his mother, to whom he was close, was devoutly Catholic. He hoped to join the navy, but the naval academy took no new cadets after Spain lost most of its fleet and colonies in 1898, so in 1907 he entered the infantry academy at Toledo instead.

In 1912 he asked to be sent to Spanish Morocco, where Spain was fighting a long colonial war against the Rif tribes. Brave, cold and lucky, he was promoted rapidly and in 1916 was badly wounded in the stomach. In 1920 he became second-in-command of the new Spanish Foreign Legion, and in 1923 its commander. He helped lead the Alhucemas landing of 1925 that broke the Rif resistance, and in 1926, at 33, became the youngest general in Europe. The brutal methods of the African army, including the killing of prisoners and the display of severed heads, shaped the officers who later led the rebellion. In 1928 he became director of the new General Military Academy at Zaragoza.

The monarchy fell in April 1931 and Spain became a republic. Franco, a monarchist and conservative, disliked the new regime, which closed his academy, but he stayed loyal for the time being and kept out of a failed coup in 1932. In October 1934 the right-leaning government put him in charge of crushing a revolutionary miners' uprising in Asturias, which he did with Moroccan troops and the Legion, at the cost of well over a thousand lives and thousands of arrests. He became army chief of staff in 1935, but after the left-wing Popular Front won the elections of February 1936, he was moved to command the Canary Islands.

Franco joined the military conspiracy organised by General Emilio Mola late and cautiously. When the coup was launched on 17 and 18 July 1936, he flew from the Canaries to Morocco and took command of the Army of Africa, the best troops in the Spanish army. The rising succeeded in about half the country but failed in Madrid, Barcelona and most of the industrial areas, and the country fell into civil war.

German and Italian transport planes carried Franco's troops across the Strait of Gibraltar, and both dictators, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, then sent arms, aircraft and men: the German Condor Legion and some tens of thousands of Italian troops. The Soviet Union aided the Republic, while Britain and France adopted non-intervention. Franco's columns advanced north from Seville, and at Badajoz in August 1936 they shot hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners and civilians. On 1 October 1936 the rebel generals named him Generalísimo and head of state, and the deaths of Generals Sanjurjo in 1936 and Mola in 1937, both in air crashes, left him without rivals.

The attack on Madrid failed in November 1936, and the war became a long campaign of attrition. In April 1937 the Condor Legion destroyed the Basque town of Guernica. In the same month Franco merged the Falange, Spain's fascist party, and the Carlist monarchists into a single movement under his own leadership. His forces took the north in 1937, cut the Republic in two in 1938 and won the battle of the Ebro. Barcelona fell in January 1939, about half a million Republicans fled to France, and on 1 April 1939, after the surrender of Madrid, Franco declared the war over.

In the territory they controlled, the Nationalists carried out a systematic campaign of killing, known as the White Terror, aimed at Republican officials, trade unionists, left-wing party members, teachers, freemasons and others. Killings by Republican forces, the Red Terror, also took many thousands of lives, including thousands of priests and nuns, during the early months of the war. After the victory Franco's repression continued on a vast scale: military courts sentenced tens of thousands to death, and hundreds of thousands passed through prisons, concentration camps and forced-labour battalions, which among other things built the monumental Valley of the Fallen near Madrid. Historians estimate that at least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 200,000 people were killed in the White Terror during and after the war. Children of imprisoned Republican women were taken from their mothers, and political parties, free trade unions, strikes and the public use of Catalan and Basque were suppressed.

When the Second World War began, Spain was exhausted, short of food and dependent on imports. Franco sympathised openly with the Axis. In June 1940 he declared Spain "non-belligerent" rather than neutral and occupied the international zone of Tangier, and on 23 October 1940 he met Hitler at Hendaye on the French border. He offered to enter the war in return for Gibraltar, French North Africa and large supplies of food and fuel, which Hitler would not grant. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 he sent the volunteer Blue Division, some 45,000 men over the course of the war, to fight on the Eastern Front. As the Allies began to win, he drifted back to neutrality in 1943.

After 1945 Spain was ostracised: it was excluded from the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, and in 1946 the UN called on its members to withdraw their ambassadors. Franco survived by stressing Catholicism and anti-communism over fascism. In 1947 he declared Spain a kingdom with himself as regent for life. The Cold War rescued him: in 1953 he signed a concordat with the Vatican and agreements allowing American bases in Spain, and in 1955 Spain joined the United Nations.

From 1957 Franco gave economic policy to technocrats, many linked to the Catholic organisation Opus Dei, who opened the economy in 1959. Tourism, emigrant remittances and foreign investment fuelled rapid growth, the so-called Spanish miracle of the 1960s. The regime remained a dictatorship, with censorship, a single movement and harsh treatment of opponents, including Basque nationalists of ETA; political prisoners were still executed in 1974 and 1975. In 1969 Franco named Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón as his successor as king, and in 1968 Spain gave independence to Equatorial Guinea.

Franco suffered from Parkinson's disease in his last years and died in Madrid on 20 November 1975. Juan Carlos became king two days later and, against the expectations of many of Franco's supporters, led Spain to democracy, confirmed by the constitution of 1978. A 1977 amnesty meant that no one was tried for the crimes of the dictatorship. In 2019 Franco's remains were removed from the Valley of the Fallen, since renamed Cuelgamuros, and reburied in a family tomb, and searches continue for the mass graves of his victims. Spaniards remain divided over how to remember him, but historians agree that his regime was one of the most repressive in post-war Western Europe.